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Travellers
Travellers
Dec 22, 2025 8:43 PM

Author:Helon Habila

Travellers

'Once I started reading Travellers, I couldn't stop. With power and control, it plunges the reader into a maze of lives that crisscross between Africa and Europe. Refugees and not only refugees hungering for the north, pushing their way through the barriers of waves, human failings and unrealistic dreams.The novel has all the weight of art with the sting of breaking news. I loved it. It is Habila at his best' Leila Aboulela

Poignant and beautifully sculpted, a novel about exile, identity and the many kinds of travellers moving through our modern world - from the Caine Prize-winning author of Oil on Water and Waiting for an Angel

Modern Europe is a melting pot of migrating souls: among them a Nigerian American couple on a prestigious arts fellowship, a transgender film student seeking the freedom of authenticity, a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and child in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a Somalian shopkeeper trying to save his young daughter from forced marriage. And, though the divide between the self-chosen exiles and those who are forced to leave home may feel solid, in reality such boundaries are endlessly shifting and frighteningly soluble.

Moving from a Berlin nightclub to a Sicilian refugee camp to the London apartment of a Malawian poet, Helon Habila evokes a rich mosaic of migrant experiences. And through his characters' interconnecting fates, he traces the extraordinary pilgrimages we all might make in pursuit of home.

Reviews

Helon Habila's fourth novel has it all - intelligence, tragedy, poetry, love, intimacy, compassion and a serious, soulful, arms-wide engagement with one of the most acute human concerns of our age: the refugee crisis...

—— The Guardian

A wonderful gem. . . Heartbreaking but equally life-affirming tales that beautifully connect and intertwine, leaving us longing for more

—— Elif Shafak

Once I started reading Travellers, I couldn't stop. With power and control, it plunges the reader into a maze of lives that crisscross between Africa and Europe...The novel has all the weight of art with the sting of breaking news. It faces the urgent questions of our times and doesn't settle for easy answers...it is indeed Habila at his best.

—— Leila Aboulela

Urgent, deeply empathetic, and resisting easy answers, TRAVELERS follows the interconnected lives of African immigrants and refugees in Europe and examines the meanings of freedom, diaspora and home. Habila is a masterful storyteller, and this novel a riveting testament to the power of fiction.

—— Lisa Ko

Describing worlds and convergences that are unforgettable, Helon Habila writes of individual lives - pulled apart by our wars, our failed states and our deepest fears - with insight and searing compassion

—— Madeleine Thien

At once intimate and expansive, Travellers captivated me from the very first pages

—— Aminatta Forna

a parable of our times and Habila tells it beautifully, shedding poignant light on the world of the dispossessed and the stateless.

—— Mail on Sunday

Adroitly teasing out the rich quiddity of his characters' diverse journeys, he instead makes the simple yet valuable point that refugees' lives are as irreducibly complex as anyone else's.

—— The Observer

A quietly haunting novel that captures the untethered, unreal nature of migrant and refugee existence.

—— Metro

Yarns of persecution, paranoia, even manslaughter, unspool across its patchwork pattern. Habila tells them with cunning, flair and a sleight-of-hand that lightens even the gloomiest scenes.

—— The Spectator

In an era of mass migration, Habila suggests, stories are a common ground, a means of making ourselves at home with our homelessness.

—— Literary Review

With this book, Pandora has done heavy lifting around our day-to-day quandaries for you. Thoughtful, well-researched and wise, Pandora's got it licked. You need it on your desk for those moments when you think "what's the point"? Read it and then bugger on feeling a lot brighter and less alone.

—— Emma Barnett

Provocative and profound, subtle and thoughtful, funny and beautiful.

—— Daisy Buchanan

In How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?, Pandora Sykes puts her considerable intelligence, unflinching attention and incredible use of language to scrutinise, unpick, challenge and forgive some of the trickiest knots facing modern woman. Under her gaze the apparently superficial reveal significant and systematic injustices; the personal is used as a way to prise open a window on conditioning, consumerism and codswallop. She looks beyond the white, middle class, well-educated female experience to ask: where are we, how did we get here and don't we deserve better? It's a bloody triumph.

—— Nell Frizzell, author of THE PANIC YEARS

By turns sparkling and serious, How Do We Know We Are Doing It Right? exemplifies Sykes' uncanny reading of the zeitgeist

—— Claire Allfree , Metro

As zeitgeisty and juicy as an episode of The High Low with extra dollops of knowledge, nostalgia, wit and wisdom from Pandora's decade in journalism, I ripped through this. Utterly fascinating.

—— Emma Gannon

In this collection of essays on modern life, she turns her razor sharp attention to everything from GOOP to that Zara dress and our obsession with authenticity and will have you understanding the wild, weird and wonderful times we live in a little better.

—— Red

Brilliant, thoughtful and incisive [...] a break from the noise.

—— Evening Standard

Oh-so relatable

—— Kate Wills , Sun

With her trademark wit, wisdom and warmth, Pandora seems to leave no stone of modern life unturned in this thought-provoking read.

—— Good Housekeeping

Sykes has channelled her wisdom into a book of essays which explore everything from email culture to fast fashion and the cult of 'authenticity'.

—— HerFamily.ie

[A]bsurdly well-researched, prescient and pin-sharp [...] so definitely pick it up'

—— Sirin Kale

[I]t's thrillingly, DELICIOUSLY fascinating about How We Live Now. She's a MINE of information- philosophy, science, literature, stats, all pulled together in her coolly elegant prose. I could not put it down!

—— Marian Keyes

These 242 pages are an (exhaustive, though not depressing) middle-finger to the word 'should'. A word which justifies women feeling the need to constantly scrutinise every decision; in the name of self-improvement, in order to have the Best Life Possible, at a hundred miles an hour.

—— Buro247

Energetic and compelling.

—— Olivia Sudjic

Sykes stays true to "High Low" form by using a high-low mix of vocabulary ... We have all had moments of asking ourselves if we are doing "this" - gestures vaguely - right, which makes the book all the more likeable. This is a form of learning how to succeed by failing - as it admits to being human.

—— Best non-fiction books about failure , Independent

Pandora is my personal guru on all things relating to the zeitgeist. How lucky you are that she can now be yours too.

—— Dolly Alderton

This will spark a thousand conversations and encourage us to find our own path to contentment.

—— Best nonfiction books of 2020 , Topshop

Hailed as a manifesto for modern women ... packed with her trademark wit, wisdom and philosophical references (if you know her, you know), this book is the opposite of doom and gloom. Instead, her judgement free observations are reassuring, comforting and wholeheartedly uplifting.

—— Marie Claire

Rushdie is a master storyteller who weaves his fictions and characters into such agreeable tapestries.

—— Sarah Hayes , Tablet

The novel's dazzling virtuosity and cascade of cultural references culminate in a final moving moment of hope

—— Jane Shilling , Daily Mail
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